Following my previous post on why agencies should prioritise “good enough,” I had a conversation regarding the importance of founders having a “passion” for their work. The argument is that you need to love what you do to survive in the long term. My view is the opposite: the last person who should start a business is someone with a passion for the product.
Passion is a driver for emotional decision-making, which almost always undermines the business. We see this most clearly in the food and drink sectors: breweries, distilleries, and bakeries. Someone starts a bakery because they love the craft of baking. That love is short-lived once they are waking up at 03:00 every day to meet a 07:00 delivery deadline.
The passionate baker will use the best ingredients and spend hours kneading dough to a level of quality no one asked for. The hotel receiving the delivery just wants a functional roll for a bacon sandwich. The baker eats their own margin to satisfy an internal standard that the customer isn’t paying for. (This is just a simplified example but you get my point)
I am better suited to running a food business precisely because I have no particular skill in cooking. Taking the passion out of the equation makes it easy to make rational decisions and meet customer expectations. I learnt this the hard way with Yazaroo. I started it as a branding agency because I was a brand designer. That worked for a short time, but it ignored the reality that 50% of the company’s profit came from website support and 30% from web design.
Once I accepted that the market wanted a web design and support agency, not a branding agency that “also does websites”, I was able to focus on what actually made money. Today, Yazaroo is primarily a web design and support agency. We do not do any other design work unless we are investing creative capital in exchange for equity.
If you are starting a business and you are blinded by knowledge and passion, find a pragmatist to play devil’s advocate. You need an objective opinion to keep your personal standards from killing your profit.
